Johann Gottlieb Fichte is the first truly great thinker among Immanuel Kant’s many eminent intellectual descendants. In Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre,1 Kant’s Copernican revolution in philosophy achieves heightened metaphilosophical and methodological self-consciousness, and Kant’s signal innovations are radically rethought, systematically reintegrated, sharply critiqued in some cases, and boldly extended in others. The initial result—the so-called “Jena Wissenschaftslehre” of roughly 1794–1800—is the first monumental work of post-Kantian idealism, and moreover is “post-Kantian” in the best possible sense: it is unmistakably the achievement of a thinker steeped in and inspired by Kant’s critical philosophy, yet it teems with challenging new concepts and strikingly original analyses and arguments. All things considered, Fichte’s work is no mere recapitulation or commentary on the critical philosophy; it is a searching and singular contribution to the tradition as a whole. And owing to the time and the (often tumultuous) circumstances of its initial presentation and reception,2 to study Fichte’s philosophy in context is to immerse oneself in one of the most intensely productive and consistently profound periods in the history of Western thought.3,4
Fichte’s Philosophy in Context
Part I of this anthology examines Fichte’s ideas in relation to their wider cultural climate, their debt to (and deviations from) the philosophy of Kant, and their influence upon two other major German Idealists: Schelling and Hegel. In Chap. 2, “Fichte’s Life and Philosophical Trajectory,” Yolanda Estes interweaves an account of Fichte’s eventful personal life with an overview of his complex philosophical development. Naturally the latter task demands some selectivity, and Estes’s approach is to focus mainly on issues brought to the fore by the most fateful episode in Fichte’s contentious career: the “atheism controversy” (Atheismusstreit) of 1798–1800. According to the Jena Wissenschaftslehre, the ultimate enabling conditions for cognition and volition are accomplishments integral to the autonomous self-articulation of “the I”: the transcendental subject, on a post-Kantian construal. And one such accomplishment, Fichte argues, is the positing of a “moral world order,” by which the intelligible efficacy of the good will is assured, and from which the significance of the sensible world finally derives (IWL 149 [GA I/5:353]). Moreover—Fichte adds, scandalously, in 1798—a conviction of this kind constitutes religious belief or faith (Glaube) “in its entirety,” at least insofar as such belief has a rational basis; and that is because “this living and efficaciously acting order is itself God. We require no other God, nor can we grasp any other.”—Or so he claims, on the grounds that we “cannot grasp personality and consciousness apart from limitation and finitude” (IWL 150–52 [GA I/5:354–55]).
Such assertions, which were read by many as arguments for atheism, helped to spark a major controversy by which Fichte was soon engulfed, and to which he responded in a series of noteworthy (but now seldom studied) writings that pointedly present some essential elements of his idealistic account of I-hood and the ultimate ordering principles.5 To be sure, the themes foregrounded by the atheism controversy, along with the claims stressed by Fichte in his failed attempt to weather it, do not exhaust what is philosophically salient in Fichte’s system. Still, this entire episode, much of which is recorded in texts familiar only to specialists, harks back to topics central to the Wissenschaftslehre’s inception6; anticipates the markedly more metaphysical and religious tone of its later presentations (in which the independently “self-positing” I of the Jena Wissenschaftslehre is more and more explicitly positioned as a mere semblance or manifestation of a unitary, all-encompassing “being [Sein]” or “God”); and dramatically problematizes the conceptual connections between transcendental idealism, morality, and metaphysics.
Of course, any fully worked-out account of the latter connections will also have to take stock of the key relationships between Fichte’s position and the paradigm and prototypes provided by Kant’s work. The many complex connections between Kant’s critical philosophy and the Wissenschaftslehre are a major theme throughout this volume, beginning with Chap. 3. Fichte himself frequently characterizes the Wissenschaftslehre as a more rigorous and radical statement, justification, and consolidation of the basic implications of Kant’s main innovations. Kant’s own philosophy, according to one of Fichte’s more memorable formulations, “is correct—but only in its results and not in its reasons” (EPW 371 [GA III/2, no. 171]).7 Accordingly, one main tendency in recent Anglophone Fichte-scholarship has been to work to substantiate such claims—for instance, by reading Fichte’s project as a form of transcendental idealism8 that has been ruthlessly purged of Kant’s residual realism (including, e.g., Kant’s apparent commitments to ‘things in themselves,’ a causal model of perception, and a faculty psychology)9; as a philosophy that has thoroughly vindicated Kant’s essentially unsubstantiated claims concerning the ultimate unity (not merely the final compatibility) of theoretical and practical reason10; as a system that yields a version of Kantianism in ethics that arguably improves upon Kant’s own11; and so on.
In Chap. 3, “The Precursor as Rival: Fichte in Relation to Kant,” Günter Zöller offers a critical (but not unappreciative) reappraisal of several of Fichte’s more notable innovations. For one, Zöller argues, the novelty of Fichte’s core conceptions is often overestimated. For example, Fichte often is credited with providing the critical philosophy (which, in its Kantian form, is based on various unreduced oppositions: intuition versus conceptualization, theoretical versus practical reason, and so on) with a deeper and more unitary foundation, in the form of some transcendentally basic mode or modes of mental accomplishment (positing; the Tathandlung or “fact-act”; intellectual intuition) that would precede and prepare for the various differentiations basic to Kant’s philosophy. And yet, as Zöller points out, one can readily discern at least the outlines of those Fichtean concepts in some of Kant’s own key ideas (most notably, transcendental apperception and the categorical imperative). Moreover, Zöller argues, some of Fichte’s genuine innovations (for instance, his assimilation of theoretical to practical reason, and his topical reorganization of practical philosophy) push Kantian ideas to objectionable extremes—for example, by wiping out the boundaries between warranted cognition and interested belief, and by making morality indifferent, even antagonistic, toward the cultivation and expression of individuality.
The relationship between Kant’s and Fichte’s philosophies is examined, from a variety of perspectives, throughout this anthology (see, inter alia, Chaps. 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 18, and 19). To be sure, though, in order to measure Fichte’s historical significance, we must not only assess the Wissenschaftslehre’s connections to Kant. We must also consider, among many other things, its contribution to German Idealism, especially in the work of Schelling and Hegel.12 According to one venerable rendering of this relationship, Fichte clarifies and consolidates the critical philosophy by ridding it of Kant’s residual realism and underived dualisms, but the result (or so the story goes) is a one-sided, merely subjective idealism, in need of supplementation by the objective idealism developed by the young Schelling—which, in turn, is assimilated and transcended by absolute idealism à la Hegel.
In Chap. 4, “Fichte, German Idealism, and the Parameters of Systematic Philosophy,” Andreas Schmidt adopts a decidedly different viewpoint on the relations between these figures. Schmidt argues that the most significant way (albeit not the only way) in which Fichte influenced his successors was by reframing the early post-Kantian debate around a number of novel problems: problems concerning (1) the architecture, (2) the topic, (3) the certainty, and (4) the generation of the ideal philosophical system. Schmidt further suggests that both Schelling and then Hegel propose such new and divergent solutions to these problems that it becomes doubtful whether any two of these three thinkers are pursuing one and the same basic project. Thus it also becomes questionable whether we can rank their various accomplishments according to some one, mutually acceptable standard. Nevertheless, Schmidt argues, we can credit Fichte with having established the basic framework within which such divergent projects could take shape.
Metaphilosophy and Method
Fichte constructs the Wissenschaftslehre using a wide range of methodological tools, including abstraction, reflection, transcendental argument, dialectical derivation (of which he is a true pioneer), intellectual intuition, “genetic construction,” a principle of “reciprocal determination,” and a la...